The Lark

When I was a child, I was friends with a lark. It was no ordinary bird, for it could talk. And by talk, I mean human speech. This isn't one of those stories where in the end, the narrator turns out to be an animal or some inanimate object.

I was speaking about the lark, yes.

It was a magnificent bird. Not magnificent in appearance. No brightly coloured plumage, or any splendid crowns. In fact, I sometimes doubt whether it is a lark. I think I'm just terming it so because I like the word.

Lark. Lurk. Dark.

Anyway, the lark was a great friend, the best I had, and I had many.  Every evening, I’d chat with it near the river. It’d tell me about all the places he had been, the people he had seen, the things he’d witnessed. We always talked over each other. Many a times we’d be talking simultaneously about completely different events. An example:

“I went to the crematory today…”

“I killed a fly. It was quite slimy…”

“… were sad. The crowd kept…”

 “… the sound it made when I squashed it. Wow…”

“… burned the body! A perfectly fine body…”

“… quite tasty. Although, not crunchy…”

“… like it smoked sometimes, but I would've preferred this one…”

We were thick buddies. The lark felt lonely. It never fit in with his kind. Thankfully, I had no problems like that. My peers loved me, and the elders adored me. The kids at my school respectfully hush up whenever I walk by, and my teachers always speak to me with a sweet tone. Not once do they raise their voice. Well, a couple of them did, once… but that is a story for a different time.

Coming back to my lark. I hadn't named him, as he hated names. He was teased by his folks because he didn't look like them, and his voice was absurd. I liked it, though. It reminded me of a knife against leather; slow, deliberate, coarse, and real. The lark was a polite being, and rudeness was a foreign concept to him.

We got acquainted by chance, actually. It was unplanned, as all great friendships are. 

We met near the riverside. It’s one of my favourite spots of the town. The rippling water had a peculiar calming effect, its colour as gaudy and dark as grease mixed with ink. The grass was interspersed with stuff of all kinds. And the colours! They weren't vibrant or brilliant, which I find hard on my eyes. No, it was a dulled palette, a throbbing, toned down scene. The grass was a wet shade of green, and the brown of the mud was more like the colour of moulding leather.

The river carries all kinds of stuff  on its back. Bones, plastic materials of every colour, pieces of cloth, metal  items, vegetables, fruits, and cooked food. The food was a delight. The veggies and the fruits were soft and squishy, and incredibly sweet, their colours mingling. The occasional rice and chapati were flaky, and the tastes seemed to erupt in my mouth. The air was an explosion of smells. Smells that soothed. And if you were lucky, you might even find an animal there. Or a person.

That was a lucky day. I found one, my very first one. It was quite fitting, now that I come to think of it. The feast of friendship.

The body was floating by when I first saw it. As fate decreed, it got stuck on a branch, nudging against the bark invitingly. I sloshed over and dragged it onto the grass. It  wasn't a difficult task, but not a piece of cake either; albeit it proved to be better than a cake. It was heavy, but I was strong even then.

The clothes on the person hung in loose drapes. I tore them off, and arranged the person in a sprawling posture. It was a lady. I wish I knew her name.

She was fair and had bluish green ripples all along the length of her, making her look like a frosted ice-cream. Her hair was a tangled mat of twigs, leaves, and weeds. She looked disproportionate. Every part of the body appeared to be puffed up, like how a dough puffs up when making chapati? Yes, like that. They have a word for it, I’d learned it sometime back…

Bloated. That’s how it was.

Yeah, moving on. The face was unrecognizable. The whites of the eyes were now an artist’s abstract work of red and green, the nose seemed to have collapsed into itself, and the ice-cream skin around the mouth widened into a grin, showing weeds, and grass, and a dead insect stuck between the blackened crevices of her perfectly arranged teeth.  

That was when we met. It arrived in a flurry of wings, and screeched at me to go away, but my mouth simply fell open in amazement. Never before had I seen such a gorgeous bird. It was pure white, its feathered body shining with a dull sheen. Dull, I love dull. I’d seen its brethren, but I hadn't ever come across any like this lark before.

It kissed the navel of the ice-cream lady, and a spurt of scarlet splattered the pristine white, mesmerizing me.

The spray of red on white. It has stuck with me all these years.

A piece of the red dangled from its beak and with a graceful ark and shake of his head, the lark gobbled it up. I hesitantly stretched out my left hand, and once again, it screeched. I didn't stop. Reaching for that small puncture in the ice-cream lady, I touched it with my middle-finger. And pressed it. Deeper and deeper. Wet and slick. I bent my finger and tore out a piece of red for myself. It hung loosely from my nail. And at that moment, for the first time ever, I felt truly euphoric.

* * * **

“Hamed, what is that known as?” the new teacher asked, her tone sounding strangely familiar to my ears.

“A lark, miss. I wrote it here.”

“Yes, I can see that,” she replied.

It came back to me, the tone. I hadn't heard it in a long time.

“That isn't how a lark is supposed to be, stupid child.”

Condescending. That was what it was. Condescending.

“It is…”-- exhale-- ”… a lark. I've seen them-“
“Hamed, that’s not a lark. It’s a raven. And you need to learn some courtesy. Correct it at once.”

I didn't like the way she spoke to me. Not at all.

Maybe I should introduce her to my lark. He’d love her. He always likes my gifts.



Author's Note: Inspired by Hannibal, so forgive the similarities!